I watched this, but the key question I have (haha) is if the keying ability of this software is better than that which is integrated into hitfilm pro. I am working in a project which is going to use a lot of minitature model photography and stop motion animation (ie. still images, which may have motion blur added later).

Would this be a better solution for creating an image sequence - by keying out stills manually, and saving individual images with transparency - which will be brought into hitfilm and animated / composited? Or, would it be better to use this as a tool for creating background plates / digital 'set peices' to be used behind keyed video /animation which is keyed in hitfilm?

Add another image layer on top and select your image with green screen

Select the layer with the green screen, go to effects and add the Chroma Key effect. By default it will attempt to automatically determine whether it is green, blue or red screen and pick the best tone of those colors. However if your photo is particularly challenging then you may need to switch to "Manual" and pick a color from your image - picking one near an edge - particularly hair is a good.

Now if you need to you can turn color matching the background on/off as desired and dial in how much you want.

Additional, if you want to configure the lightwrap behaviour you can also do this.

If the key or spill replacement needs some further work you can use the "Refine Key" and "Spill Suppression" tabs. When you switch to these they will by default show you an appropriate matte to help you decide which sliders to use to refine things.

If you have other items in your image which arent green screen, you an use the masks on the layer.

If you want to have multiple foregrounds or backgrounds, then you can go to the layer, add add more Content Variations, bu clicking add in the Content panel and selecting other images from your disk. You can then switch the active content by just selecting it.

@zobo1942 In summary, Imerge can be used for both of your use cases. The best thing is to try the demo and see where it fits for you best (the demo has no restrictions other than a watermark on export). The basic algorithm in Imerge is the same as the one in HitFilm. There are two primary things which are improvements in Imerge.

Background color matching - this analyses the background you are compositing on. It determines things like what the tonal range is and if there is any color cast and transfers that to the foreground so they blend better. You can do a similar thing by adding a separate grading transfer effect in HitFilm but you will need to configure it a bit more.

All processing in Imerge is done in 16-bit, linear tone curve and unpremultiplied color space. This means that the keying algorithm by default has more colors to work with than say the default 8-bit in HitFilm. What I would say is try the keying in both. If HitFilm works well enough for you then you won't need to round trip. Equally, if Imerge does key it better and you want to use some of the filters unique to it go ahead and use that.

@zobo1942 One other consideration. Hitfilm is limited in the size of a comp shot by GPU VRAM. 2GB or more for 4K, 4GB or more for 8K. But Hitfilm is working with VIDEO, so also has to account for generating 24-60 (or more) frames per second. Imerge is built for STILLS, so can accept larger media that Hitfilm for the same GPU VRAM.

This gives Imerge an advantage when trying to prepare large images before importing them into Hitfilm.

Putting it another way, I just loaded a 4608x3456 image into Imerge. In Hitfilm, my GPU doesn't let me create anything larger than 2160 px high (4k video). If I were to bring this same picture into Hitfilm I'd not be able to work with it at full size. In Imerge I can.

I know this is a wishlist item for Imerge already, but I'll post it here as well: Hopefully in the future FXHOME will be able to implement a system where Imerge projects will be able to migrate easily to Hitfilm in some way. The hope here would be to create an Imerge project with masks and effects and multiple layers and be able to take that directly across to Hitfilm with each Imerge layer becoming a Composite Shot layer, which would be fricking fantastic for anyone doing virtual set or matte painting work!

Regarding your two requests so far, here is some hopefully useful guidance...

Adding a logo as a watermark

First, I am assuming you already have your logo in PNG format and in a large size. If you actually want to draw a logo, you will struggle to do that in Imerge Pro as its more about compositing (combining images) and processing photos than drawing things from scratch.

Lets say you have two images and you want to put a watermark in the bottom left of each of them.

Here you can see a project with two layers. It has the background layer, which has 2 different images for content.

I can then toggle the layer to using the other content by just selecting it:

Now, i turn on the watermark layer above it, which references my made up logo.

Now I move the anchor point of the layer to the bottom left of the watermark (this is what is considered the center of your layer and things will scale and rotate from that point).

Next, I set the origin point of the layer (to the right of the position boxes) to the bottom left.

Now i set the position to 5% from the bottom left. This has put it in the bottom left corner. What changing the origin has done is let us position relative to the bottom left rather than the center. This is important now if the different content variations of my layer are different sizes they will automatically reposition themselves.

Now I can scale my logo down to the appropriate size.

I could now change the opacity, blend mode or even add some Style Effects like outline glow etc if I wanted. Im going to keep things simple here.

If I now go back to the backgrounds layer and change the active content by toggling between the images in the list you will see the watermark is always in the bottom left.

And now if i go to the batch section I can export these variations:

And if I export using the default settings and go to the folder its output too i will see this:

And you can see the two images with the watermark has exported to the directory.

Adding items using ChromaKey

The rough steps for this are as follows:

Add a layer with your greenscreen image

To this layer add the ChromaKey effect

By default the effect will try to automatically detect whether it is a green, blue or red screen and pick a color. It does this by analysing how much of each color there is in your photo. There are a few auto methods to choose from. However, its not foolproof you may need to set it to Manual and then select a green from the image (one close to an edge is usually preferable, like around hair).

If there is still green in your image, you can use the "Refine key" and "Spill suppression" areas. Refine key helps you to dial in how much green screen is removed and the spill suppression allows you to remove green casts in reflections on your subject and around fine detail like hair. More information on these will be coming soon.

Choose whether you want the lightwrapping bahaviour which wraps the background around the edges of your keyed subject for a more realistic composite.

Choose whether you want the keyed subject to be color matched to the background.